1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to mobile devices and, more particularly, to file searching on mobile devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
The usage of ultra-light mobile computing devices (e.g., smart phones) will continue to increase at a rapid pace. Such devices have already become major conduits for the sharing of multimedia content (e.g., photos and video). As mobile devices become more acceptable and integral to workplace productivity, they will be used for creating, editing, and distributing traditional office documents.
These trends indicate that a fundamental user requirement will be an ability to search and retrieve documents in an intuitive manner on a mobile device. The main problem here is that mobile devices often lack a copy of the document itself. For example, some situations where the mobile device lacks a copy of the document including the following: the document may have been transferred to a laptop or other storage device and deleted from the mobile device; the document may have never been downloaded to the device such as, e.g., if the document is provided to the mobile device via an email and the user does not read/open the document or the attachment on the mobile device; the document may be transient and transcoded to fit the device form; and so forth. Current desktop search tools do not adequately address the problem at hand, as they primarily index files based on file names, contents, and document types which cannot work if the document itself is not available on the mobile device. In addition, the way these desktop search tools index files limits the kinds of queries a user can submit (by date of last modification, creation, filename, directories, words in the file, content type, and so forth). While such queries are useful in many circumstances, they are often frustrating to end-users as these existing tools exclude queries that use easy to remember spatio-temporal events associated with the documents.
Other related prior art proposes to associate files with other files that have been accessed around the same time or lower level system activities related to active application windows. These methods do improve traditional queries as they permit specifications of temporal events into the queries. However, these methods all require files to be present on the device to work and they fail to exploit unique features of the mobile devices that can help in document search.